yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Environmental change and adaptation in Galápagos finches | Middle school biology | Khan Academy


2m read
·Nov 10, 2024

This here is a picture of the ground finch of the Galapagos Islands, and one of its primary sources of food is seeds that it finds on the ground. If we go back to 1976, we can look at the distribution of beak depths, and these beak depths I would assume are given in millimeters. Finches are quite small birds, and you can see in 1976 you have a large number of finches that had a beak depth of 8.8 millimeters, but it was a distribution around that.

Now, after this data was collected, it turns out there was a drought, and there were fewer seeds. The smaller seeds, which were easy to eat for all of these finches, would have been consumed quickly, and all that would have been left were the larger seeds, the ones that you need a larger beak in order to crack and get at the good stuff.

So what do you think would have happened to the distribution of beak depths over the course of the next two years? Well, you might guess that the birds, the finches that have larger beak depths, are more likely to survive because they're more likely to be able to crack the larger seeds. The finches that are more likely to survive are also more likely to reproduce and pass their large beak trait to their offspring.

And that is indeed what scientists observed. As we go from 1976 to 1978, the distribution has shifted a pretty good bit to the right. Now, the most common beak depth is 9.8. So this is an example of an environmental change, a drought changing the food supply, because now there are fewer small seeds available. That changed a distribution in beak depths over just two years.

Now, environmental changes don't always cause adaptation. If it's too severe, if the drought was so strong that there were no seeds, you could have extinction; so the species disappears altogether. But here we have an example that in just two years, a species was actually unable to adapt a pretty good bit.

Now, no individual member of the species knew to somehow grow their beak, but as we saw, you always have a variation of beak depths. Year after year, the birds with the bigger beak depth were more likely to survive and reproduce. So the species as a whole adapted to the new environmental conditions.

More Articles

View All
The Fermi Paradox — Where Are All The Aliens? (1/2)
Are we the only living things in the entire universe? The observable universe is about 90 billion light years in diameter. There are at least 100 billion galaxies, each with 100 to 1,000 billion stars. Recently, we’ve learned that planets are very common …
Where Is The Economy Going After The Pandemic? | Morning Joe
What is going on with the economy as prices seem to be going up everywhere? And you also just can’t seem to order anything. Things aren’t there. Yes, we have disruption to the supply chain, not just domestically but globally. But the reason that there is…
Challenges of naturalization | Citizenship | High school civics | Khan Academy
Now that we’ve talked about the naturalization process and the eligibility requirements for naturalization, let’s talk about how difficult it can be to become a naturalized citizen. Immigrant residents seeking naturalization face barriers throughout the p…
Can social media help GROW your business?
Remember, lots of businesses in America didn’t make it through the pandemic. This one did, and this is a giant location with all kinds of overhead. Look at how big it was! You’re kind of a story of survival, and I’m going across the country trying to find…
Biden's Student Loan Forgiveness Is A MISTAKE! | Sen. Lummis Crypto Policy Interview
[Applause] [Music] The Biden administration is leaning towards ten thousand dollars in student loan forgiveness. For more on this issue and a look at the best path forward, let’s bring in O’Leary Ventures chairman Kevin O’Leary. He’s also a CNBC contribut…
"Where Love Is Illegal": Chronicling LGBT Stories of Love and Discrimination (Part 1) | Nat Geo Live
I’m really grateful to be here, and the reason I’m so grateful is actually, you’re really helping me out. I made a promise to the people whose photograph… photographs who you’ll see tonight. I promised them that their stories would be heard, and you’re he…